Man Overboard; Woman Underhanded : EAST IS EAST <i> By T. Coraghessan Boyle (Viking: $19.95; 325 pp.) </i>

As he jumps 60 feet from the bridge of the freighter Tokachi Maru (12,000 tons, with a Savannah-bound cargo of microwave ovens), Hiro Tanaka, third cook, has a burning vision. Despised in Japan because of his mixed blood--his father was an American hippie--Hiro will swim to the Georgia shore and make a new life among the shopping malls, movie theaters and unconstraint of a society that is nothing but mixture.

As she types and broods in the Hart Crane cottage at Thanatopsis, a flossy writers’ colony on Tupelo Island, Ruth Dershowitz, a doubtfully talented but usefully connected writer, has her own fervent and mixed-up vision. She wants to be the toast of the literary world, profitably published, and the permanent squeeze of her useful connection: Saxby, the son of Thanatopsis’ proprietor.

In his bumbling, comic and ultimately somber fashion, Hiro thinks of himself as a samurai, as portrayed in the writings of his hero, Yukio Mishima. The wandering warrior, that is; unbeholden to society, entirely self-achieved and, in case of failure, self-destroyed. In a far-fetched echo, Ruth--known to her fellow-Thanatopsians as La Dershowitz on account of her flamboyance--has a samurai touch herself; at least to the extent of being self-invented and unstoppable.

The wonderfully tangled and disruptive encounter of this pair is not so much a clash of elemental forces as of elemental misapprehensions. Boyle recounts the results in a novel that is spirited, clever and very funny. Its efforts to strike a more serious note here and there, on the theme suggested by its “East Is East” title, are interesting but less successful.

Boyle gets things off to a bravura start with a series of splendidly devised scenes, far-fetched in the literal sense of assembling a great many disparate elements from a long way off. We have Hiro struggling, clamped to a life preserver, through the Atlantic, “a pale certificate of flesh” in the moonlight. A copy of Mishima and eight one-dollar bills are taped to his chest; his thoughts are of miso soup at first, and then of heroism, and finally, of “water, water, water.”

Also in the nighttime Atlantic are Saxby and Ruth, naked and having enthusiastic sex in his mother’s motor boat. With a start of indignation, Saxby spots two hands gripping the gunwale, and a waterlogged face peering over. “Is he some kind of pervert or what?” he yells, lunging for him. Terrified, Hiro flounders off into the night.

We shift to the island. It is two islands, in a way. This is the indulgent writers’ life at Thanatopsis: gourmet meals, booze and gossip in the main hall by night; gourmet box-lunches and creating by day in the cottages.

Elsewhere, there are the swamps, the insects and the tin-roofed shacks where the poor black people live. It is two Americas, and Hiro has landed in the wrong one. He hides out, hungry--he is a gourmand--and scared. The immigration authorities are after him. And after a comically disastrous encounter with a terrified shack-dweller who accidentally sets his own dwelling on fire, so is everyone else.

Hiro’s misery makes us ache and scratch. Instead of the shopping malls there is the blazing sun, nowhere to wash, and nothing to eat except crabs and grasshoppers. When the sun goes down, he faces “the obscene drama of the night with all its comings and goings, its little deaths and devourings, its spiders and snakes and chiggers.”

These scenes alternate with Ruth up in the colony, posturing, scheming, flirting and trying to write. As we foresee, the two converge. Hiro emerges from the swamp, desperate, and snatches Ruth’s lunch bucket. She melts before such need and smuggles in meals, clothes and bandages. She lets him sleep in the cottage at night when she is up at the main house, promises to help him escape to the mainland and, at one point, makes love to him.

Ruth’s motives are satisfyingly mixed. She figures she can use Hiro for a short story. But she also manages a genuine tenderness, a sympathy that struggles quite unconsciously with her ambitions. Boyle lampoons Hiro and Ruth and the self-indulgent Saxby but, at least with the first two, he respects their struggles and their pain. Saxby, whose own ambition is to develop a commercially viable albino pygmy sunfish, is treated with a suitably greater coolness.

The author’s mix of parody and empathy gives his novel an arresting complexity. He evokes some splendid chaos as a sheriff’s posse surrounds Ruth’s cabin, and Hiro bulls through it with a banzai scream of “Make my day.” (He has studied Clint Eastwood as well as Mishima.) His escape from a rickety cell is first-rate slapstick, seasoned with a touch of Japan ese smugness at American inefficiency.

But when Hiro takes refuge in the Okefenokee Swamp after a dizzying tangle of events, there is genuine awfulness along with his comic dismay. And when, delirious, he is rescued, and mistakes Ruth--who has come along with a loudspeaker--for his mother, we are genuinely moved.

At the end, Ruth will find success, though not quite the kind she had hoped for. Hiro, defeated, will find a grim justification in the spirit of tragic rigor imparted by his samurai models.

Boyle falters in his shifts of tone. He has not been satisfied simply to use elegant irony to stiffen his comedy and make his points about East and West, and their collision of ambitions and misunderstandings. He has tried for a deeper and more direct emotion, and doesn’t manage to hold it all together.

For the most part, “East Is East” is rather like a playful and elegantly managed puppet show. This is no defect at all; puppetry can be a high art, and Boyle has a lovely artfulness. But when the author juxtaposes the comic with the tragic, it is as if, out of sheer fondness for his creatures, he had come out on stage and embraced them. Flesh tangles with strings.